Wednesday, May 4, 2016

When I was in my twenties I would write short stories for a year, then write a novel, then write poems for nine months and rotate them around like that. So i went to Europe when I was twenty eight and hand wrote poems only, in cafes and parks and train stations. And then I'd send them to my mom and and she would type them up and send them to Gordon Lish, the only editor who had published my work at that time. What a nice thing for my mom to do, and what a huge boost to my confidence to know that a serious editor was going to look at them. Not many of them actually got published, but a few did and that was enough.